this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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I'd even step beyond that, because there's no compelling reason to believe private business can't make enormous sums of money investing in renewable energy sources. This really does boil down to which investors are in charge. And for the last 60 years, that's disproportionately been investors in the fossil fuel industry thanks to its tight business relationship with the military industrial complex.
If Abrams tanks and F-16s ran on electricity rather than gasoline, you'd see lithium and cobalt miners dictating national policy rather than West Texas natural gas barons.
I agree, to an extent. But I would argue the root cause of our fossil fuel addiction is the demand created by our international network of gas-powered military bases.
I largely agree with you, with the caveat that we need to separate climate emergency from growth addiction and capitalism at large if we're going to talk about the military industrial complex.
We will inevitably end our reliance on fossil fuels because even an intransigent sect of fossil fuel barons will eventually fall prey to free market economics. And then we'll have a bunch of great power competition incentivizing carbon-free military tech, and we'll be desalinating the oceans to build our sodium battery-powered UAVs whose autonomous targeting systems are trained by blowing up coral atolls.
I hope you see my point. Joel Kovel did a masterful job laying this out in The Enemy of Nature (2008). When I say social revolution, I mean some way to organize society so that we can get the psychopaths out of positions of power, i.e. a society that rewards cooperation instead of competition.
With the speed and scale of our military budget increases, these seem like entangled problems. The current rush to build out these massive resource-hungry AI tools is being driven, in no small part, by the NSA and FBI and CIA in their thirst for rapid data processing and analysis.
We don't live in a free market (and we never really did). We live in an oligarchy, and these industries exist as a patronage network surrounding the seats of political power. O&G consumption is a kind-of sinecure for financial elites. A guaranteed income stream predicated on huge markups for natural resources paid out of the public purse, which is then used to fund political careers and fatten think tank and corporate media coffers of industry allies.
All this has to follow the Big Number Go Up logic. So we need more wars to consume more energy at a higher price, which then goes into new capital assets and rising equity rates that enrich a still-wider base of patricians. And all of these people form the foundation of the political network that keeps politicians and industrialists in authority.
We won't end our reliance on fossil fuels precisely because intransigent fossil fuel barons will prevent our transition to green alternatives.
The only thing that can really incentivize this transition is losing a big military engagement in a way that forces the transition. And for all the sins of ICE engines, Russia/Ukraine are proving out why they work perfectly fine as killing machines even when they're half a century out of date.